Enabling Interoperability for ROS-based Robotic Devices for Smart City HADR Operations

Smart Cities of the future come with the promise of betterment of human civilization. Technology usage in Smart Cities rely heavily on Internet-of-Things (IoT) concepts along with the legacy Information and Communications Technology (ICT) assets. Apart from the static assets deployed across the city such as sensors, the IoT revolution has enabled the development of cheaper yet effective robotic devices. While the robots in the market are becoming more accessible enabling adoption by private individuals as well as governmental agencies, there is the lack of interoperability between the robotic devices. Especially during Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Recovery (HADR) operations in Smart City environments, robotic devices deployed from a single agency might not scale for HADR operations. In such cases, it is necessary to ensure multi-agency sharing of robotic capabilities. This paper proposes a ROS-based platform-independent architecture for robotic devices that can be adopted by civilian and military agencies to share capabilities during HADR operations.